Dipole Imaging – Medical Physics

There are some medical conditions that are electrical in nature, for example, in the heart or brain. Treating these conditions involve localizing and identifying the part of the heart (or brain) which behaves erratically without having to cut open the patients. One way of doing this would be to place electrodes on the patient’s body and use the measured voltages to reconstruct the pattern of electrical activity within the heart. This can enable measurement of electric dipoles within the human body due to electrical activity within the heart or brain. Our project this past summer was to simulate this situation in two dimensions. We made a dipole using a nine volt battery, and to represent the body were uniform conductors in regular shapes such as circles and squares. We placed electrodes around a shape on the boundary, placed a dipole on the shape and measured the voltages. We made a program in Labview, dipole algorithm, to detect the position of the dipole when placed on the shape in relation to the center of the two dimensional shapes. The Labview program successfully determined the location of the dipole for a variety of geometric configurations.